I Got a Psychic to Read Trump’s Fortune

With historically low approval ratings, an increasingly uncooperative legislative branch and a pitbull special investigator now yapping at his heels, Donald Trump’s future is looking less certain by the day.

Unfortunately, as much as one might want to know what the future holds for the leader of the free world, we’re all forced to take prognostications and extrapolations with a heaping spoonful of salt these days. To say the pollsters and quants got things wrong during the presidential election would be a bit of an understatement. So, rather than return to that well, I found a fresh source for information about Trump’s trajectory: a psychic.

After some calls to a few of the mystics in my area with decent Yelp ratings, I chose Jenny, a psychic in Hollywood, California to do this unique reading. Though there were a few local psychics who agreed to perform this sacred rite, Jenny won me over by price-matching another fee quote because she was “very interested in being a part of this experience.”

I arrived at our appointment as she was tidying up the room and burning sage to clear up the bad energy (and smell of the McDonalds lunch remnants still on the table). Jenny was warm and understanding of my unfamiliarity with these magicks, agreeing to explain the reading as it went along and to take no offense at any of my dumb questions. I pulled out a color printout of Trump’s official portrait and set it on the table and cut the tarot deck so she could begin divining.

Normally, Jenny explained, 10 cards would suffice for a reading, but with the future of the entire world hanging in the balance, she felt a full 23 card layout was in order.

“I see lots of conflict, lots of swords, battles, war in his future,” said Jenny.

It saddened me to think of the loss of life, American and foreign, that the cards were foreseeing, but it didn’t seem too far a stretch based on what we already know about President Trump’s foreign policy acumen.

Jenny pressed on to explain that the cards were telling her that Trump’s businesses and personal wealth would take a drastic hit while he served as Prez. Again, not too wild an idea, given how things seem to be going. I asked for info on the rest of the Trump brood and got my first shocking reveal of the evening.

Jenny told me that, despite the aforementioned harbingers of doom, the cards were telling her that the Trumps were on their way to becoming America’s next Kennedy family with Ivanka and Jared staying in the limelight for decades to come.

With my mouth already agape, Jenny nonchalantly dropped the bombshell reveal that young Barron Trump would eventually reclaim his father’s throne and become a U.S. President as well! Up until that point, I was fairly certain that the crowd-shy Barron would contentedly live out his life hanging out on computers, maybe becoming president of a Minecraft server at best. Clearly the forces behind these cards knew something I didn’t.

Jenny pointed out the fool card, and I thought she was about to go in for an easy joke, but, instead, she noted that this indicated Trump would suffer no health issues during his presidency. Despite Trump’s personal physician claiming he would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” I was beginning to have my doubts that this frequently exhausted 70-year-old—our most elderly president—would last through the year, let alone the eight Jenny was predicting. Yet again, the cards forced me to choke down my prior assumptions.

As if one borderline medical miracle wasn’t enough, Jenny let me know that the Empress card was informing her that Melania, though closing in on 50, would have another baby during the terms. “With Donald?” I inquired, just to be sure.

The room spun around me as Jenny read the cards, calmly divulging one Earth-shattering prophecy after the next. Links to Russia? Cleared of all charges. ISIS? Eradicated. Border wall? Erected. Terrorist attack on U.S. soil? Bigger than 9/11. I tried to intonate to my supernatural guide that journalists go their entire lives chasing down scoops a fraction of the size of these, and here she was handing them to me like candy.

It was when we delved into economic territory that I began to have doubts about Jenny’s gift. The cards were bullish on Trump, no doubt, but when they told her that manufacturing would not just be coming back to America, but actually put us first in production across the world, I wondered if perhaps Jenny was merely using this opportunity to air her own optimism about and support for the president. Things took a darker turn when Jenny pressed on about the U.S. dollar’s purchasing power and the demographics of the current American workforce.

“I feel like when you walk into a store it’s not people like you or me working there anymore, it’s ‘them,’” said Jenny, in a I don’t need to tell you, ‘cause you already get it aside.

Now, up to that point, given her neighborhood and features, I had imagined Jenny to be Latina (or maybe Filipino), so the sudden tonal shift of “us” and “them” rattled me. I’d gone into this project prepared for a smidge of personal bias to influence the reading, but never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined it would take this form.

For the remainder of the reading, I tried to steer Jenny away from “I feel like” statements and have her focus more on what the specific cards were saying, but there was no getting this genie back in the bottle. Jenny had nothing but kind words for the commander in chief, saying “he really means well,” and he’s only struggling because “he’s being unfairly attacked at all times.”

If I’d wanted dogmatic defense of Donald Trump, I could’ve saved a lot of money and just called my dad.

I wrapped things up with Jenny and thanked her for the reading. Though she knew I was a bit of a skeptic going in, she seemed pleased with how things had played out and encouraged me to come back to find out what the fates had in store for me.

I’ll schedule that follow-up once Melania starts showing, Jenny. For now, I can only sit back and hope our country and the president’s future are as bright as the one you predicted.